Programming Challenges

Programming Challenges
by Miguel Revilla, Steven S. Skiena

Programming Challenges
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Book Summary Information

Author: Miguel Revilla, Steven S. Skiena
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-05-12
ISBN: 0387001638
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Springer
Accessories:

Book Reviews of Programming Challenges

Book Review: Pearl of Programming Contest :)
Summary: 4 Stars

Great Archimedes appears with his famous "Eureka" in the minds of contestants when they get their solutions accepted by the judge. But if you scan through the famous bookstore's catalog you won't find such sort of books reflecting programming contests rather you'll find many good and huge volumes of professional programming books! You may also find many really good books on mathematical competitions like "Math Olympiads". But they don't get the whole job done!

From the first chapter and appendices this book is trying to familiarize the online judge and contest system to the newcomers and old contestants will know about different language using statistics and problem's level.

Most of the book (80%) generally discusses on "Data Structures". There are of course many very good books on this particular important field, but this book focus on their implementation in contests rather than deep materials. And the good thing is, it gives reference on any specific part of data structures or algorithms for further study.

I think the mathematical problem oriented portion (graph theory, number theory and geometry) is brighter than the other topics. It's good as algorithmic problems of programming contests always carry some special cases that depend on mathematics. Besides, many contestants just miss the higher rankings just for comparatively weakness in mathematics.

A good algorithm book shouldn't depend on any particular programming language but this is not an algorithm book, it's a programming contest tutorial or manual, so, it also contains different tips of algorithmic performance with time and tricky language syntax usage to optimize the solution of any challenging contest problem. But this book seems to be C language oriented. It's true that it has given many good library references on C++ and packages of Java but you won't find any code belongs to these languages. May be both C++ and Java (it's much more than C++) contains many predefined methods to handle data structures. But I think, as there are many good books on data structure and algorithm then it should give more C++ and Java code and their usage in contests, where of course time matters.

And the other thing is, this book contains many problems which are taken from acm.uva.es site, besides it's a book which have a companion website then it can be easily avoided to give the problems (description and sample IO) in the book. The pages used just for the problems can be more utilized by giving many techniques on the contest and tricky language syntax or library usage of C++, Java and another avoided language PASCAL.

Summary of Programming Challenges

The challenges of problems from international programming competitions are an effective way to improve your algorithmic and coding skills and understanding.   This volume uses international programming competition-type problems to motivate the study of algorithms, programming, and other topics in computer science.  The book includes more than 100 programming challenges, as well as the theory and key concepts necessary for approaching them.  Problems are organized by topic, and supplemented by complete tutorial material.  Readers gain a concrete understanding of both algorithmic techniques and advanced coding topics.  Unique Features: *  Offers a wealth of rich programming problems suitable for self-study -- all with on-line judging at www.programming-challenges.com *  Presents practice training for all major programming contests -- ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC), International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), and Topcoder Challenge *  Serves as a convenient, web-based means of adding a programming component to any algorithms or software engineering course *  Contains complete working code for fundamental data structures and graph, string, numerical and geometric algorithms *  Provides a brief-yet-thorough treatment of key elements in number theory, geometry, dynamic programming, and graph algorithms *  Supports all popular programming languages (C, C++, Pascal, Java) Steven S. Skiena is a member of the faculty of computer science at SUNY Stony Brook and is author of many widely used books, including The Algorithm Design Manual.  He received the 2001 IEEE Computer Society Undergraduate Teaching Award.  Miguel Revilla is a member of the faculty of computer science at the University of Valladolid, Spain.  He is official website archivist of the ACM ICPC and creator/maintainer of the primary robot-judge, contest-hosting website.  

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